VDR currently doesn't work with NPTL (Native Posix Thread Library).
Either don't use NPTL, or set the environment variable

LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1

before running VDR.

Also, please make sure your environment is NOT set to use UTF-8 or any other multibyte character representation. If so, it should be replaced by something like iso8859-1. Depending on the distribution the variables LANG and LC_CTYPE could be in different locations. These have to be set before starting VDR

export LANG=de_DE.iso8859-1
export LC_CTYPE=de_DE.iso8859-1

de_DE.euro should also work.

First of all a recent version of VDR is required. There are two releases to choose from, the stable release with an even version number (like 1.2.x) and the developer release with a odd version number (like 1.3.x).

Which version is choosed depends. The developer release has more features, but for the stable release more plugins are available.

Installation

The source is decomplessed in the $SOURCEDIR and a symbolic link vo VDR is created

These directory are for the recordings, for the EPG data, the configuration files and for the plugins. The directory can of course be altered to the personal likings. Especially the from the video directory seperated configutation directory has the advantage of using different VDR versions with different configurations, but with one directory for the recordings.

Network

VDR offers the possibility to be controlled over the network with the help of the SVDRP protokoll. In the configutation file svdrphosts.conf every host and/or network is listed that is allowed to access to VDR. Only localhost is allowed in the standard configuration.

Miscellaneous

runvdr is a start script for VDR that comes with the sources. It not only starts VDR it also starts the DVB driver and recovers all after a crash.